The Guggenheim Show ‘Silence’ Spans Kawara’s Career

A show on conceptual artist On Kawara includes many of his famous ‘date paintings’

By

Marc Myers

Jan. 30, 2015 5:08 pm ET

Two years before his death in June 2014, the artist On Kawara made an unusual suggestion as New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum planned “Silence,” his career-spanning show, which opens Feb. 6. He offered the exhibit’s curator a list of oblique titles—including “48 Years,” “Self-Observation” and “Monologue”—for each of the exhibit’s 15 sections.

From On Kawara’s Today series.
Photo:
David Zwirner, New York/London

“They made complete sense since treating the show as a traditional retrospective was anathema to Kawara and to me,” said
Jeffrey Weiss,
the exhibition’s curator. “Unlike most artists, you really can’t divide his work into chronological periods of development since his work didn’t dramatically change.”

Born in 1933, Kawara worked as an avant-garde artist in Japan in the late 1950s. He moved to New York in 1965, where he helped to pioneer conceptual art. The movement, which found inspiration in
Marcel Duchamp
’s transformation of a urinal in “Fountain” (1917), abandoned traditional painting and sculpture to focus on ideas and concepts expressed through unconventional media.

The new exhibit features large slices of Kawara’s conceptual projects, many of which lasted decades. For example, on display are 150 of Kawara’s “date paintings” from his “Today” series—which total nearly 3,000 and were created between 1966 and 2013. Each piece features white letters and numerals on a monochrome canvas that depict a month, day and year, and most are accompanied by randomly chosen newspaper pages from the same dates. Kawara’s “I Got Up” series features more than 1,500 of the 8,000 tourist post cards he originally mailed off to friends between 1968 and 1979. On the back of each card, Kawara rubber-stamped the words “I got up at” along with the time of day he climbed out of bed.

“Kawara found a way to make art that reflected the coordinates of where he was and what he was doing without telling you anything about the content of his experiences,” said Mr. Weiss. “The work is in the first person, yet exquisitely abstract and completely egoless.”

Kawara’s passion for maddening repetition and volume stirs up thoughts of
Jack Nicholson
repeatedly typing a single sentence in “The Shining.” “In his work, Kawara marked and counted time, but the results make you more conscious of your own experiences on any given day,” said Mr. Weiss. “He wanted his art to reflect the minutiae of his existence and assimilate art-making to the activity of daily life.”

The exhibit also will include a continuous public reading three days a week. Two readers will sit at a table in the rotunda and read aloud from Kawara’s 24 binders called “One Million Years.” The pages feature one million years into the past and one million years into the future typed in dense, chronological order.

Kawara’s determination to work exhaustively on concepts over extensive periods wasn’t without a dash of Dada humor. In his “I Am Still Alive” project (1970-2000)—a series of telegrams and wires sent to friends—one says, “I am not going to commit suicide. Worry.” “One thing that separated Kawara from many of his conceptual contemporaries is the existential dimension of his work,” said Mr. Weiss. “You wind up reflecting on your own life in the context of passing time.”

Corrections & Amplifications

An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the public reading at the museum would go on continuously during museum hours. The article also erroneously said the On Kawara binders to be read covered just a million years.